Gotti Mob Magic Does It Again with Hung Jury.

Friends of ours: Junior Gotti

Call him the Teflon Scion. John "Junior" Gotti, son of the Teflon Don, slipped clear of the feds' determined grasp yet again yesterday with his second mistrial in eight
months after prosecutors apparently failed to convince two-thirds of the jury that he was guilty of racketeering.

After less than 10 hours of deliberation, the jury foreman wrote a note to Manhattan federal Judge Shira Scheindlin: "We are completely DEADLOCKED. More time will not change the views in this room."

The foreman, Greg Rosenblum, later revealed that eight jurors believed Gotti's claim that he had quit the mob before July 22, 1999 - meaning the five-year statute of limitations would have expired on racketeering charges that the feds brought in 2004. Rosenblum told WNBC/Channel 4 those same eight jurors also had enough doubt in their mind to clear Junior on charges he ordered the kidnapping of radio host Curtis Sliwa.

"How many people on that jury felt that he had given up the mob life? Eight. And the other four felt . . . that he was still involved in some way," Rosenblum said. The foreman accused the four holdouts of finding Gotti guilty before giving him a chance to prove his innocence - and said that nothing the defense did was going to change their minds. "I was hoping that everyone could have at least kept an open mind, but it seemed like certain individuals on the jury had him guilty beforehand," Rosenblum said. "There was no evidence that we could directly see that linked him to anything since 1999 that would implicate him in any sort of extortion or loan-sharking schemes."

On Sliwa's kidnapping, Rosenblum said, "The eight that felt that he had withdrawn [from the mob] also felt that there was enough evidence pointing, enough doubt, enough reasonable doubt, that he had nothing to do with it whatsoever."

As the judge excused the panel, a relieved Gotti hugged his lawyer, Charles Carnesi, while another member of his defense team called Junior's wife, Kim. "He's coming home again - it was a good result," lawyer Seth Ginsberg told her. But Kim Gotti already knew, because minutes earlier a Post photographer had told her the verdict as she raked leaves on the front lawn of her Oyster Bay Cove, L.I., mansion.

"No way!" she exclaimed, dropping the rake and running inside the house. But her husband's trials are not over. The prosecution team immediately asked the judge for a speedy retrial date. "We gotta do it one more time," said Junior, who is free, under house arrest, on $7 million bail. "I'm going to sleep in my own bed tonight . . . It's better than sleeping in the MCC [Metropolitan Correctional Center]. "I'm happy," he added as hugged his mother, Victoria. "I'm financially ruined, but what are you gonna do?"

His mother, Victoria, who heard testimony about her Dapper Don Juan hubby's love affairs and allegedly illegitimate children during the trial, was not happy. "I'm just very disgusted at this point . . . They're trying to railroad my son," she snarled. Her namesake daughter, Victoria, chimed in: "We wanted an acquittal. I just think they're going to keep on trying. The fact that they're not winning is great."

As he hopped into a car to head home, Gotti told a crush of reporters, "I'm going to see my children." On the prospect of another retrial, he said: "I'm worried. I'm
concerned always. I've got five children home. I want to raise my children."

If convicted, Gotti, 42, faced up to 30 years in prison for kidnapping and extortion. He is accused of a long-running racketeering conspiracy - including sending two mob hoods to kidnap and beat up Sliwa in 1992. Defense attorneys admitted young Gotti had been active in organized crime, but insisted he had withdrawn in early 1999.

Sliwa, the founder of the Guardian Angels, had testified about the shooting attack at the retrial - as he did at the first trial. But this time around, his WABC radio talk-show partner, civil-rights lawyer Ron Kuby, took the stand as a defense witness and, in bombshell testimony, supported Gotti's claim that he had quit the Gambino crime family. He testified that Gotti told him in 1998 that "he was sick of this life . . . He wanted to rejoin his family and be done with this."

Sliwa, who rushed to the federal courthouse when he learned about the hung jury, blasted Kuby for betraying him and said he wouldn't be surprised if his former pal was at Gotti's home "toasting his friend."

In seeking a speedy retrial, prosecutor Michael McGovern lobbied for an April 17 start, but the defense pushed for a later date. "The lawyers on this team haven't been paid for this trial, now we're talking about another trial," said defense lawyer Debra Karlstein. The judge ordered lawyers for both sides to return to court on Monday to set a retrial date.

Gotti's pregnant wife rushed out onto their front lawn with the family dog and three of her kids when he pulled up shortly before 5 p.m. "I feel great, these are my three sons," Junior Gotti said, posing with them briefly before disappearing inside. Asked what his wife had prepared for dinner, he said, "Whatever she makes - any free meal is a good meal."

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Sliwa Bashes Kuby

Friends of ours: Junior Gotti

An enraged Curtis Sliwa yesterday lashed out at his radio talk-show partner Ron Kuby for helping John "Junior" Gotti - the man the Guardian Angel founder believes had him kidnapped and nearly killed - get another hung jury. "I don't know if I'm going to be able to go into that studio on Monday without wanting to literally do harm to this guy," Sliwa said of his WABC co-host after Gotti's retrial on racketeering charges was declared a mistrial.

Sliwa, wearing his trademark red Guardian Angels cap and satin jacket, blamed civil-rights lawyer Kuby for convincing at least some jurors that Gotti couldn't be convicted of racketeering, due to the statute of limitations, because he had quit organized crime more than five years before he was indicted.

"My very dear friend, who is a friend no more, didn't even give me a heads-up he would be testifying for my enemy," he said, adding, "It hurt me even more than the three hollow-point bullets and the baseball attack in 1992." Sliwa called Kuby's testimony Gotti's "ace in the hole" and said, "I wouldn't doubt that he's probably at [Gotti's home in] Oyster Bay . . . literally
toasting his friend."

Sliwa said he can't fault the jurors for being unable to agree on whether - or when - Gotti quit the mob. "If I were a juror and saw Ron Kuby willingly coming in and testifying for the guy who ordered the death of his friend and co-worker, I would have my doubts also," he said.

Kuby said he understands Sliwa's distress, but insisted he's not to blame for the hung jury. "He thinks that the Gottis ordered him shot, and I understand Curtis is upset about the statute-of-limitations problem, but that's not my doing," he said. He pointed out that after the first trial, Sliwa "lashed out at the jury, claiming that they had been reached by the Gottis. "This time he lashes out at me," Kuby said. "It's not about him. It's not about me. It's about the strength or weakness of the government's case."

Kuby stressed that "the jury hung the first time, when I had no involvement in the case." He added that Gotti's claim that he was quitting the mob is something he's heard from "every defendant that I have ever had" who pleads guilty, which is what Gotti was doing when he allegedly told Kuby in 1998 that he wanted out of "the life."

"They say they're sick of this life or they want to go home, they're tired of this . . . Whether they ultimately gave up their life of crime or not is something of which I have no knowledge." Kuby also insisted, "I'm not good friends with John Gotti Jr. I'm not even friends with him."

Of his next broadcast with Sliwa, he said, "On Monday, we go in and continue to try to do good radio."

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Reputed Gambino leaders reject plea deal

Friends of ours: Gambino Crime Family, Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, Anthony "The Genius" Megale, Alphonse Sisca

The reputed leaders of the Gambino crime family rejected a plea offer Wednesday that would have headed off a New York trial and the testimony of an FBI agent who prosecutors said infiltrated the Mafia family, an attorney said.

Arnold "Zeke" Squitieri, who allegedly served as Gambino boss, and Anthony "The Genius" Megale, who prosecutors said was the family's No. 2 man, were among dozens of people arrested in the New York mob sweep last year.

Federal prosecutors offered a plea deal that included a wide range of prison sentences of up to 15 years for nine defendants in the case, said Stephan Seeger, who represents Megale.

The defendants had until Wednesday to accept the offer and Seeger said it was rejected because all the defendants couldn't agree. He said he expects some defendants, including Megale, will continue negotiating before trial.

Squitieri's attorney, Gerald Shargel, had no comment on the negotiations and said he was preparing for the May 8 trial.

The U.S. attorney's office in New York had no comment Wednesday. Documents on file in New Haven, where Megale faces up to 6{ years in prison on a related case, also describe the negotiations.

Prosecutors say Squitieri, Megale and other defendants made millions of dollars through extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling and other crimes during the past decade.

Megale, 52, of Stamford, was Connecticut's highest ranking gangster, prosecutors said. He pleaded guilty in October to racketeering conspiracy in Connecticut but denies being the Gambino underboss.

An FBI agent in the New York case posed as a mobster and helped make hundreds of secret recordings, authorities said. He was so convincing, the FBI said, he was considered for Mafia membership.

Attorney John L. Pollok, who represents reputed Mafia captain Alphonse Sisca, said Wednesday morning that plea negotiations have been difficult because prosecutors insisted all nine defendants take the deal.

Megale's attorneys are trying to negotiate a deal in which his sentence could run concurrently with whatever he receives in Connecticut.

Thanks to Matt Apuzzo

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The Other Problem at the Port

Friends of ours: Gambino Crime family, Genovese Crime family, Anthony Anastasio

With all the recent talk about security vulnerabilities at the nation's ports, one subject goes virtually unmentioned. The men who actually control many of the nation's docks, especially on the Eastern seaboard, are in the hip pocket of the Mafia and have been for decades.

Regardless of whether or not a Dubai-owned company manages operations at these ports -- currently the source of much hand-wringing in Washington -- many of those with the most direct access to the billions of tons of cargo that move through those ports owe their jobs to the mob.

How can that be? It all has to do with the peculiar institution of the union hiring hall. No matter who owns or operates the ports, the union, not the employer, actually assigns workers to jobs. You can't work unless you carry a union card. And on East Coast and Gulf ports, the union card belongs to the International Longshoreman's Association (ILA), one of the most mobbed-up unions in the country.

In July 2005, the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) against the ILA, which targets the entire 31-member ILA executive council, including the president, secretary-treasurer, executive vice president, general vice president and more than two dozen others.

In a press release accompanying the suit, the Justice Department notes, "For decades the waterfront has been the setting for corruption and violence stemming from organized crime's influence over labor unions operating there, including the ILA and its affiliated locals, as well as port-related businesses. Since the late 1950s, two organized crime families -- the Gambino family and the Genovese family -- have shared control of various ports, with the Gambino family primarily exercising its influence at commercial shipping terminals in Brooklyn and Staten Island, and the Genovese family primarily controlling those in Manhattan, New Jersey and the Port of Miami."

The Justice Department has already won convictions against more than a dozen high-level Gambino and Genovese mobsters who controlled docks on the East Coast and is also seeking convictions of several ILA officials. The government has charged these men with extorting money from waterfront businesses and terminal operators and extorting thousands of dollars from individuals seeking employment on the docks, among other crimes.

And this recent spate of ILA indictments is only the most recent example in the long history of organized crime control over the union. New York University law professor James B. Jacobs describes that history in his new book, "Mobsters, Unions, and Feds: The Mafia and the American Labor Movement." "Cosa Nostra became the primary power on the New York harbor waterfront in 1937, when Anthony Anastasio . . . took control of the six New York harbor locals," says Jacobs, and it has remained so ever since. In the 1970s, the federal government won convictions of more than 100 mobsters, including 20 ILA officials, among them ILA Vice President Anthony Scotto.

Yet despite this sordid history, few lawmakers who profess concern about port security seem in the slightest bit worried that the ILA's role on the docks may constitute a huge security risk. The ILA contributes millions of dollars each election cycle. In the 2004 election cycle, the ILA's political action committee (PAC) had over $7 million cash on hand to distribute to candidates.

Among the top recipients of ILA PAC money in the last few elections were Sens. Frank Lautenberg, D-NJ, Robert Menendez, D-NJ, Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., Chuck Schumer, D-NY, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-NY, all of whom represent states with important ports. Some of these same senators are among the chief critics of the Dubai port deal, but they are noticeably silent when it comes to mob influence in the union that actually controls who works on these ports.

Union bosses who would rob their members of pensions and health benefits, extort money to secure jobs on the docks, and use the docks to run gambling, loan sharking and other illegal enterprises could just as easily facilitate terrorists hoping to slip agents or weapons into the country, perhaps unwittingly, for the right price. But few in Washington seem to have considered the risk. The Dubai deal is not the only port issue that deserves more congressional scrutiny; ILA corruption surely deserves a close look as well.

Thanks to Linda Chavez

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American Metaphor

Bada bing! 'The Sopranos' is back for its sixth and final season. But what does it say about family, about women, about the Italian-American identity? And how did it become the biggest phenomenon on television?

NEARLY two years since its last new episode aired on HBO in June of 2004, the dark, startling, multiaward-winning series The Sopranos will return to cable television this Sunday (March 12, 9pm) for what the show's creator and mainstay, David Chase, says will be its final season of 20 episodes. A dozen will air this spring, with a coda of eight more beginning in January of 2007.

Although getting information on the upcoming season has been almost as difficult as locating bin Laden (though, unlike HBO, at least bin Laden sends out preview tapes), rumors and sources close to the show (I communicated with someone who has seen the opening four episodes) indicate that a major "hit" takes place in the season opener and that bloodshed between one of New York's major five mob families and the rogue northern Jersey-based Sopranos gang flows freely during the new first four installments.

All of the series' major surviving characters are back for the final run—at least at the beginning: the show's lead and center of gravity, Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), his enabling wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), his nephew and heir apparent, Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli), Tony's psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), and his aging albeit sly uncle, Corrado "Junior" Soprano (Dominic Chianese).

Tony's two kids are back, too, of course: his ever-blooming daughter, Meadow, (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and his sullen, petulant son, Anthony Jr., or "A.J." (Robert Iler). Their respective passages through adolescence over the past seven years have been truly something to behold—both painful and enchanting at the same time—and their simple biological transformation has added an element of veritas to the show that no story line ever could.

Rounding out la famiglia Soprano, both through blood and by oath, in the final run are Tony's consiglieri Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt), capo Paulie "Walnuts" Gualtieri (Tony Sirico), the dignified New York crime boss, Johnny "Sack" Sacramoni (Vincent Curatola), now sitting in an orange jumpsuit in the federal pen, and his volatile underling, Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent), filling in for him with a vengeance on the mean streets of the Eastern seaboard.

It takes more than a scorecard to follow the action on the Sopranos (there have been 65 episodes to date over the past five seasons, going back to 1999), and for the newly initiated or just casual observer who wants to get into the swing of things, HBO provides plenty of background information on both character relationships and plotline at HBO.com. And all five seasons are now available in DVD.

Season 5 culminated in a vortex of violence, with Tony whacking his cousin Tony Blundetto (played brilliantly by Steve Buscemi), and Silvio brutally taking out Christopher's girlfriend Adriana (played with equal brilliance by Drea de Matteo in an extremely limiting role), who had been turned over by the feds.

That's not to mention an escalating series of murders between the New York and Jersey families, with Leotardo seeking revenge against Tony. That conflict promises to be central to the new season and at the heart of the show's epilogue. The inside word I got is that Paulie Walnuts and Tony's son, A.J, are at the center of this early drama.


Growing Up Soprano: Tony Soprano, as played by James Gandolfini, combines the fathering genius of Homer Simpson with the insane anger issues of Ralph Kramden. Is this the American father?

The new season begins just about a year after we last saw the family, with Tony escaping the feds and Johnny Sack on his way to prison. Tony and Carmela are apparently reconciled, though the terms of their cease-fire are cloudy at best.

Unlike in past series openings, however, there's not a new antagonist brought in to serve as Tony's season-long foil. The plotline turns inward. There's been plenty of shit left on the table during the first five seasons, and the characters go at each other trying to put it all back neatly in place. Murder becomes the mode de jour for finding order amid the social entropy.

There's also every indication that Chase is taking the show's physical violence—of which there has always been plenty—to astonishing new heights, while at the same time focusing more on the individuality of the show's major characters separate from their respective broods.

I also have learned that the theme of the concluding season is drawn from a prose fragment by the late junkie Beat writer William S. Burroughs, about the Egyptian belief that we have seven souls. A passage from the fragment, set to music, serves as an epigram to the first episode: "Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives ..."

So no one seems to be quite happy with their plight at the beginning of Season 6 (welcome to the new millennium, baby); indeed, everybody in the show—and I do mean everybody—has an acute case of agita, nearly all of whom blame Tony for their fate in la vita.

Except, of course, the anxiety-riddled Tony himself, who blames everyone else. There are rivers of underlying psychological themes to The Sopranos, and three of them are denial, rationalization and projection of responsibility.

I, for one, have never taken the show's often gratuitous violence too seriously; there's a slightly cartoonish quality to it all (and to some of the made guys for that matter, most notably Paulie and Silvio, with the dolled-up hairdos).

I'm sorry, but the talking-fish scene after Tony and his boys bump off longtime pal and confidant "Big" Pussy Bompensiero (played by the much missed Vincent Pastore) in Season 2 took away the edge—and tragic horror—of Pussy's hit. This was dark dramatic comedy at its best.

If The Sopranos gets back to the complexities of its characters in Season 6 rather than focusing on the free-flowing sausa marinella across the screen, it will be all for the better.

After the series gained force in its opening season with its precise focus on character development, particularly around Tony and the complex relationships with the women in his life (most notably his mother, his wife, his shrink and his mistress), it lost its way during the second season by getting sucked into its own stereotypes, only to find its way again, if in bits and spurts, during the last three seasons.

Chase, a Stanford film school grad from the '70s who was raised in an Italian-American family in New Jersey (his family's real name is DeCesare), wrote and directed many of the initial episodes (while, amazingly, executive-producing all the way through) and has continued to guide the writing and the overall arc of the plotline to its conclusion.

Chase admittedly has been captivated by mob movies since his childhood. "The Mob provides an essential set of contradictions in Tony Soprano's character," Chase said in a 2001 interview. "It also gives you the possibility of danger and then hours of non-danger. And it gives you a world that is something allegedly private and secret."

In the end, Chase, like Tony, will be the point guy responsible for the show's concluding triumph or failure.

With such an evaluation in mind, I think that it is fair to claim that no American television show—not even All in the Family in the 1970s—has captured the American consciousness and mind-set for such a sustained period as has The Sopranos. And make no mistake about it, The Sopranos is rooted, and rooted deeply, in television's half-century portrayal of the dysfunctional American family.

Contrary to the perception of most American television critics, who have attributed much of the show's artistic success to its cinematic lineage, there is, in fact, a good deal of The Honeymooners, The Flintstones and, perhaps even more, The Simpsons ingrained in Chase's portrait of the American family than there is of the Godfather trilogy or other great American mob films. It's a soap opera writ large.

Certainly, the character of Tony—so often henpecked and repeatedly challenged by his kids and underlings, while confused and irritated by life's minutiae—resembles Ralph Kramden or Fred Flintstone far more than he does Vito, Sonny or Michael Corleone.

Tony is bumbling, clumsy and, at times, inarticulate. And he kills lots of people. He is the ultimate anti-hero. He makes silly, even stupid, jokes that he laughs at, gets cute with his therapist and even awkwardly tries to seduce her.

He is vulnerable in ways that no mob boss has ever been portrayed in American dramatic film, and it's there, in that vulnerability, that the audience can actually identify with Tony and even like his character, relate to it and embrace it, in ways that we never could with other filmic dons. He is an American everyman—good and evil wrapped into one.


I should confess at this point that I have had conflicted feelings, over the past seven years, toward the show. I was raised, through my mother's side, in a fourth-generation Italian-American fishing family on the West Coast, one with loose connections to crime families in both Chicago and New York (and later Los Angeles and San Francisco) that stretch back to the rum-running days of Prohibition. I grew up knowing how the mob worked and to respect it from a distance.

Even with that background context, I have been offended at times, as have some of my family members, by the ways in which Americans of Italian descent have been portrayed in gangster films in general, dating back to the early '30s (with the likes of Little Caesar and Scarface) on through to the present-day Sopranos.

Celebrated author and cultural critic Camille Paglia recently skewered The Sopranos on these very grounds. "They all act like Joey Buttafuoco. It's a travesty," she declared. "It is a debased characterization of Italians." But as I recently explained to a very close cousin of mine who doesn't watch The Sopranos because of such feelings, one of the reasons I'm attracted to the show is because I miss (and miss desperately at that) so much of the Italian-based culture that is portrayed in the show.

From the food to the music (I love those little dabs of Sinatra and Dean Martin, and even more, Bob Dylan imitating Dean Martin) to Roman Catholic ritual to men publicly embracing each other to the bonds that are demanded in a close-knit family structure—that which constitutes stereotypical Italian-American behavior in so much of cinema and television—is exactly what I loved and cherished during the early decades of my life. And long for so much today.

That said, there can be no doubt that Italianess—that which is perceived to have Italian roots, both good and bad, in American culture—is what attracts so many Americans (along with audiences worldwide) to such depictions. And this is even more true with The Sopranos, where so many of the portrayals are over-the-top.

Italians, in this cultural vernacular, are spontaneous, romantic, sensual, impulsive—all traits that have been suppressed by modern Wonder Bread American culture. To be Italian is liberating, if only vicariously, through the silver screen or, now, the plasma. Italians have yet to be incorporated into cultural sensibilities of "whiteness;" they remain on the margins of the mainstream, ethnic and unassimilated.

That said, I understand why the Italian-American Defamation League has been so strongly critical of The Sopranos, and they are absolutely correct that no such series would ever be allowed to wallow in such vicious and archaic stereotypes against another American ethnic group (save African Americans, of course, who are traditionally depicted as criminals and welfare schleps, including, I should note despicably, in The Sopranos.)

Both the best and worst of these Italian-American depictions take place in a beautiful yet emotionally chilling and artistically disturbing scene at the climax of Season 3, during the wake of Jackie Aprile Jr., (the son of Tony's former boss and the ex-lover of his daughter, Meadow).

Tony's uncle Junior, ever edging toward the outskirts of senility, breaks into a beautiful rendition of the Italian ballad "Curore Ingrata" ("Ungrateful Heart") amid the food and wine and trivial conversation in a corner of the room. He is encouraged by those assembled to embrace center stage, and they break into tears as he continues the song. As did I. But not Meadow, nor her younger sibling and cousins now four-generations removed from immigration and well stirred into the melting pot. They all giggle snidely as an inebriated Meadow, angered by the fate of being a mobster's daughter (though loving the perks) and sensing (accurately) that her father might have had something to do with Jackie's death, begins pelting her great uncle with bread from the table.

When Tony realizes that his daughter is the perpetrator of the assault, he goes to confront her, only to be further disrespected by his daughter, singing the banal words of Britney Spears' "Oops I Did It Again," her Ivy League pretensions and postures oozing from her smirk. But she knows trouble is coming and she dashes out the door.

This I can tell you. If one my siblings or cousins had ever disrespected an elder of ours like that in such a situation, there would have been a close-fisted response to the males, and an open-handed slap to the females. I can envision no other scenario. But that was two generations ago. Tony follows Meadow to the sidewalk, where she yells at him, "This is such bullshit," and stumbles across the street, nearly getting hit by a car in her escape.

Tony can only watch. Despite his power and his position, his agency is severely limited, and the chasm at that moment between Tony and his daughter, and between Tony and the generation that will succeed him, cannot be bridged.

It is a devastating realization for Tony.


The Feminine Mystique: 'The Sopranos' has often been accused of misogyny, especially in the third season, which featured extreme violence against women, including the rape of a central character.

No small amount of ink has been spilled assessing the portrayal of women in the show. And much of it focused on the first two seasons' relationship between Tony and his cold-hearted and poisonous mother, Livia, played to the freezing point by the late Nancy Marchand.

My family was full of Italian matriarchs, and I was raised by women from the first three generations (my great-grandmother, grandmother, aunts and mother), and I never encountered that level of bitterness or evil in any of them. Nor did I during the time I spent in exile, living in my family's hometown in Italy, where, in a social phenomenon called mamismo, something like 60 percent of the Italian male population live within three miles of their mothers.

As such, Livia's portrayal seemed exceedingly foreign to me, a ravaging exception to my personal experience of the Italian-American matriarchy.

That is not to say I haven't seen such behavior; I have. But to me it was so antithetical to the norm that I found its centrality in The Sopranos' opening two seasons patently offensive: We're talking the deep spaces of the cold storage unit here, beyond where they freeze the pork.

Chase has publicly acknowledged in several interviews that the portrayal of Livia was based on his own mother. "My mother was so downbeat, so relentlessly pessimistic," he noted, "and that, in Livia, all [came] from her."

In the pilot for the series (Episode 1), Tony declares: "My dad was tough, he ran his own crew. A guy like that, ... and my mother wore him down to a little nub. He was a squeakin' gerbil when he died."

Chase was obviously working out some dark family issues with that dialogue.

So be it. The relationship apparently fascinated much of America; it didn't me. In fact, it was one of the early turn-offs to the show.

Of course, in the absence of his mother (Marchand was ill for much of the first two seasons with lung cancer and died after filming the second), Tony's relationship with his wife, Carmela, assumed center stage. Once again, while many writers have viewed the growth and transition of Carmela in feminist terms, I find her character often weak and enabling, and astonishingly hypocritical. Most importantly, unlike Tony, she has little agency of her own.

Carmela, too, visited a shrink, and he told her candidly to leave Tony and his criminal ways. "One thing you can never say," he implored her coldly, "is that you haven't been told."

When she throws Tony out at the end of Season 4, she seems, finally, to be taking her destiny into her own hands. But when push comes to shove—when she has to decide between the material pleasures and safeguards provided by Tony and the mob vs. the unknown of life on her own—she chooses the former, in what is nothing less than a quid pro quid arrangement. If that's liberating, then we're all in trouble. Carmela is the ultimate Material Girl.

And then there is Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played brilliantly by the veteran New York actress Lorraine Bracco, who would seem to be the show's most independent woman. She is bright, intelligent, thoughtful and sensitive, but when it comes to Tony, she is duplicitous about her own attractions to him and, ultimately, cannot let him go as a patient.

She wears short skirts that she's constantly tugging at during her sessions with Tony, showing off her legs in a manner cinematically reminiscent of Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct or Anne Bancroft in The Graduate. At a base level, Melfi understands the power and attraction of Tony's life in the mob, and she is drawn to it like a moth to a flame.

I know many women who like The Sopranos—my wife included—but come a long way, baby, we have not.

In an interesting essay for Salon titled "Is The Sopranos a Chick Show?", Rebecca Traister conceded the show's feminist and "empowering" limitations, but pointed out that many of the issues addressed in the show, most often through Carmela, are those avoided by popular drama: "the trade-offs between fidelity and cold cash, Catholic guilt over divorce, stifled professional and sexual desires, a biting jealousy that threatens to overtake her happiness for her daughter on the brink of a much happier life than she will ever know."

That's all true. And The Sopranos has dealt with these and other issues of modern-day family life on an exceptionally high and rigorously nuanced plane. The series is, in Traister's words, "engrossing, and confusing, and genuine." With that I concur.

Yet when Carmela confronts Tony on his continuing indiscretions, Tony sends back a zinger that has no answers; it pierces the facade of the unstated trade-off in their marriage: "Yeah, 'cause what you really want is a little Hyundai and a simple gold heart on the chain."

It's the most devastating hit he delivers in the entire series.

In the end, portrayals of violence, family, organized crime, Italian-Americans, New Age parenting, the educational system, navigating adolescence, designer drugs, gender roles, Xanax and Prozac, et al., are not what ultimately captivates us about The Sopranos. They are all wrapped up under the larger rubric of American culture—and the American polity—as we stagger into the New Millennium.

Chase's vision is on a scale that is grand and epic. He is casting about for the American character, the American way of life, on a level comparable to that of Alexis de Tocqueville in his marvelous 19th-century study, Democracy in America. The Sopranos is as big as that.

It's a long way from the Jersey Shore to San Jose, but there are many ways in which The Sopranos resonates with the boom-and-bust years of the Silicon Valley economy. And local politics as well.

I couldn't help but think of Tony—who lines the pockets of politicians up and down the Jersey shore—when the whole garbage deal scandal oozed out of City Hall last year. Remember, Tony's listed occupation is as a "waste management consultant." But it goes farther than that. Virtually every character in The Sopranos is after the quick and easy buck. Everyone wants to be a millionaire, but no one wants to put in the time. Even Tony's newly emigrated Russian housekeeper steals from him—cutlery and gourmet capers from the pantry. "They have so much," she rationalizes.

The Sopranos is about greed and avarice and materialism and gluttony and unbridled ambition, all with no moral compass but the id. The Enron and Savings & Loan scandals and the hit on the World Trade Center and the war in Iraq are all backdrop plots to The Sopranos.

The Sopranos is about the American Dream turned inside out. And, of course, that's what did in the real Mafia. During the 1950s and '60s, the major mob families moved into drugs, particularly heroin, with their high profit margins and low overhead, and when busted, the lower end mobsters chose to squeal rather than doing the 10 to 15 years that came with a federal drug rap. And squeal they did, to the point where the Five Families of New York and the unsanctioned gangs of New Jersey have been essentially decimated.

The Sopranos are loosely based on a couple of Northern Jersey families, the DeCalvacantes and the Boiardos. They are not unknown to me. During the initial season of The Sopranos, in 1999, the feds actually wiretapped the real mobsters speaking about the TV show.

"Hey, what's this fucking thing Sopranos?," one of them asks. "What are they? ... Is this supposed to be us?"

In the end, the DeValcantes and the Boiardos and what was left of the families who weren't dead or in prison were left to petty crimes, like hustling cigarettes and running Viagra and or turning out fake "vintage" comic books. It has not been a pretty, or particularly fabled, denouement.

"Lately, I'm gettin' the feelin' that I came in at the end," Tony lamented in Season 1 about this era of mob history. "The best is over."

We'll see if the same holds true about the remarkable television series that bears his family's name.

Thanks to Geoffrey Dunn

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